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  All but Coffer. She had repeated the mantra too, but there was no change in her eyes, nor in the rhythm of her actions. She had been with the girl and she had returned changed. But that was none of Merenon’s concern now. His concern was his duty.

  Duty before life.

  Chapter One:

  Called the Expanse Sky

  Ashla Vares pushed the throttle forward and was rewarded as the deep sound of her ship’s engines dropped an octave and raised a few decibels. She smiled. The bliss of flying the Lunar Seed, a ship of her own design, added to the rush of putting her twin V-11 engines to the test and flooded her system with endorphins. What could she do but smile?

  She zipped westward across the azure sky at 600 kilometers per hour. It wasn’t much of a test for Luna’s engines, but it still felt good. As this was only Luna’s third actual test flight, it felt amazing.

  “Ms. Vares?” Captain Eldagast called over the comm in his crisp, deep voice. From his tone Ashla could tell this was the second or third time he’d called her name.

  “Sorry Captain,” Ashla replied. “I’m here.”

  “So glad to hear it,” the Captain said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Confirm your location and status.”

  “Yes, Captain. My current location is surface grid 3374 by -7289. Altitude, 5.62 klicks. Speed, 600. Bearing, 267. I’m green across the board.”

  Ashla worked to keep the smile from her voice during her report. If she appeared to gloat, Captain Eldagast would find something to nitpick and ground her before she even got started.

  “We show the same,” the Captain said. His voice almost sounded grudging. “Change course, speed and altitude to 97, 300, and 2.27. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain.” Ashla said. She could let Luna, her onboard AI, make the necessary changes. Or she could input the digits the Captain ordered on her screen. The Captain wouldn’t approve of the former, but he might prefer the latter. She opted for a more manual approach. Ashla pulled back on the power until her speed gauge read 300. Then she angled the control stick and guided her ship into a lazy turn, shedding altitude all the way, until she was facing almost due East. “Course, speed and altitude are 97, 300 and 2.27.”

  “Confirmed,” the Captain said. “We’ve got a real test for you and your ship today, young lady. On my mark change course to 134, maintain speed and altitude and proceed to the gauntlet.”

  “Yes sir, Captain,” Ashla said. She had to bite her tongue to keep from answering with a retort. I know how to get to the gauntlet, she thought. I’ve only flown it a dozen times.

  The Captain’s obsession with prescribing every alteration to her course, and his demanding expectation for her to follow each one wore on her. Her ship, the Lunar Seed, may have only flown three times, but it had completed hundreds of simulated flights. Every last cable and bolt had been triple-inspected. And she had been taught by the best pilots in the whole Alliance. No less than three presidents of leading starship manufacturers have offered to consider her ship for production once the prototype was complete.

  Despite all this, old Captain Contention had to run her like some idiot child. Ashla took a deep breath and blew it out in a raspberry.

  “Say again, Ms. Vares,” the Captain said. “I didn’t read you.”

  Ashla flinched.

  “Uhh...nothing, Captain,” she said, stammering. “Must...must have been some interference.”

  “Indeed,” the Captain said, taking on a deep, ominous tone. “Course change on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

  “Changing course to 134,” Ashla said, pulling the stick to the right. Dead ahead was a wide space of sky ten kilometers long and one kilometer wide. It was like any other piece of sky, except that protruding from the hilly, tree-dotted landscape beneath were two matching rows of tall towers. Each tower had a pulsing red light atop it. This was the gauntlet. The towers made up a massive network of holoprojectors used to create any number of unique obstacle courses. The gauntlet was smart enough to register a collision with any of the virtual obstacles. In this way, Ashla’s flight skills could be tested in a wide variety of ways without endangering her or her ship.

  “Activate the gauntlet,” Captain Eldagast said. Dozens of virtual asteroids appeared between the two rows of projectors, flying in every direction.

  “Asteroids, Captain?” Ashla said, daring a little insolence in her voice. “Isn’t that last month’s thing?”

  “Good luck, Ms. Vares,” the Captain replied.

  “I won’t need it,” Ashla said. Then to her ship’s AI she said, “Let’s show ‘em, Luna! Show me directional axes on all virtual objects and collision warnings out to one hundred meters.”

  “Acknowledged,” Luna said in her professional voice. Red, green and blue arrows protruded from the center of mass of each of the asteroids. In addition, Luna displayed distance numbers for each.

  “Good thinking, Luna.”

  One hand on the throttle, the other on the control stick, Ashla banked and turned, dove and climbed her way through the obstacle course.

  “You know, Captain,” she said, “These asteroid shapes kind of make me wish I was running this course somewhere, you know, in orbit.”

  “Mind your superior, Ashla,” came a voice she didn’t expect to here. Elder Hando’s voice was as opposite to Captain Eldagast’s as possible. Hando’s was flat and nasal, almost wet. Whereas the Captain’s voice was clipped and proper, Hando’s meandered through the words. Though she had to admit a grudging respect for the grizzled navy veteran, she never trusted, or much liked, Elder Hando.

  “Yes, sir. Apologies, Captain Eldagast.”

  “Apology accepted, Ms. Vares.”

  Keeping her lips tight and her grip on the controls even tighter, Ashla maneuvered her ship through the last few moving obstacles. She had to admit the Captain must have put a lot of planning in these gauntlet tests. They started easy, introducing her to the mechanics of each test, then ramped up in difficulty. For this one, the first few asteroids were small and slow moving. Then they got bigger and faster, forcing her to maneuver in tighter and more awkward spaces.

  The Captain would place his most devious trick at the end of each gauntlet. Ashla was ready, always taking momentary opportunities to peer ahead and see what was going on. She felt herself fall into a state of flow. Her gaze went into a soft focus, seeing the entirety of the gauntlet at one time. Her hands moved the controls, tapping buttons and adjusting virtual sliders, but the motions felt automatic, like her fingers each had a mind of their own and didn’t need to wait for commands from her brain. She gave Luna orders. Luna, as always, was instantly responsive.

  She was a single kilometer from the end of the gauntlet when a proximity warning sounded to her right. She turned her head and saw the massive asteroid barreling towards her from the edge of the gauntlet. Ashla flipped the control stick and added power to the engines. Then another proximity alert sounded, this one to the left and dead ahead. According to the data Luna displayed of the two asteroids they were on a collision course, with her in the middle. As it sometimes did when states of stress threatened to break her flow her mind threw her a random memory.

  Ashla, six years old, sat on her mother’s knee as the two shared a song under the colorful light of the nursery’s stain-glass window.

  “We’re going on a bear hunt,” mother sang, smiling.

  “We’re going on a bear hunt,” Ashla repeated, only her ‘bear’ was more like “bayo.”

  Flash forward a few verses.

  “A bridge!”

  “A bridge!”

  “A crumbling bridge!”

  “Can’t go over it.”

  “Can’t go over it.”

  “Can’t go around it.”

  “Can’t go around it.”

  “We’ve got to go under it...”

  “Wait,” Ashla said. “Maybe I can. Luna, give me power to inertial engines.”

  Luna reported her compliance with a single tone. Ashla pulle
d back on the power and the Lunar Seed’s wings and stabilizers turned, facing forward. Lunar Seed wasn’t only meant for air travel. She was rated as a Class-3 luminal vessel. Her wings and stabilizers weren’t just for creating drag in atmosphere. Each one was also a powerful inertial engine, that could apply force against the ship in any direction.

  Ashla, feeling the heavy gees pulling her away from her seat, shoved the stick forward and Luna flipped into a nosedive.

  “What is she doing?” Elder Hando squealed through the comm, but the Captain remained silent. Ashla only vaguely registered the words, but she understood the Elder’s concern. While she couldn’t suffer harm from colliding with any of these virtual rocks, she certainly could from diving into the hills below. But as steep as her dive was, she had perfect control over it. Keeping her stabilizers pointed at the two colliding asteroids she pulled back on the stick, trying to keep her ship between the simulated asteroid and the real-life ground. Then, flipping the stabilizers to face the ground, she shoved forward the throttle and pulled up.

  As one last surprise the Captain had engineered a simulated collision between the two asteroids, sending several massive boulders her way.

  “Shut down the inertial engines,” Ashla shouted at Luna. With the wings and stabilizers doing only what they were supposed to do in atmosphere, Ashla had quicker maneuvering capability. She flipped the stick to one side, and then the other, throwing the Lunar Seed into a series of barrel rolls.

  At last, Ashla straightened her ship out and blasted out the end of the gauntlet. She exhaled hard, only then realizing she’d been holding her breath.

  Triumphal chatter sounded through the comm. The bevy of tutors and officers in the control room with Captain Eldagast and Elder Hando were all talking. Talking about her. She heard one voice—she thought she recognized it as belonging to Lieutenant Commander Sark—say “What a maneuver!”

  “That will complete our test flight for today,” Captain Eldagast said. His words were as tight and formal as always but Ashla was sure she heard a note of pride in his voice. “Return to base.”

  And the celebration was over.

  “But,” Ashla said, hating the sullen sound in her voice. “You said I would be allowed to break the blue today if I succeeded at the gauntlet.”

  “I said you might be allowed. You’ve done well today but I think the Lunar Seed needs a few more safety checks before we let you escape solo. Return to base, Ms. Vares.

  Ashla gritted her teeth and felt her chest rise and fall with great, heaving breaths.

  “But-“

  “I will not repeat my order, young lady.”

  Ashla’s hands shook at the controls. She wanted to think it was from rage, but she knew she was more likely to break down in tears than anything else. It wasn’t fair. Today was supposed to be the day. Captain Eldagast had been stringing her along with next times for the past month. Now she had to turn around and go home without tasting vacuum again.

  Or would she? An idea bright as the sun rising in a clear sky dawned on her. The Captain couldn’t control her or Lunar Seed. Ashla had ultimate control. And what was it she had once heard her father say to one of his diplomats?

  “It’s sometimes better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

  Ashla shook her head and her mind was made up. She did a quick inventory on the airspace above her and found no planned flights within an hour.

  “Luna,” she said, her voice breathless. “Prep for escape velocity.

  “Ms. Ashla,” Luna replied, “We have been ordered to—”

  “Do it, Luna.”

  “Complying.” Ashla wondered if Luna could intend her offended tone.

  “Ms. Vares,” the Captain asked, a threat in his voice. “What are you-“

  “Sorry, Captain,” Ashla said, employing the oldest lie in the history of wireless communication. “You’re breaking up!”

  Before the Captain could further protest, Ashla closed the channel.

  “Okay, Luna, here we go.”

  Ashla felt a little of that flow state returning, troubled only by the tremors of excitement. After tapping a few more buttons and then reaching up to flip three hard switches, she pulled back on the stick and pushed forward on the throttle.

  “Luna, intensify forward thermal barriers and max out the G-buffers.”

  Luna complied.

  Once the Lunar Seed was pointed straight up, Ashla applied more power to the throttle and watched as her velocity increased.

  Ashla practiced the breathing exercises used to keep pilots flight-capable under high gees, even as her gauges told her the ship was minimizing the g-forces. A red, ghostly cone of heat appeared a few inches above the nose of the ship. Luna’s thermal barriers were also functioning at peak capacity.

  The clouds above filled the cockpit glass and then disappeared and there was nothing but blue sky fading to black.

  Ashla was almost to Eltar’s mesosphere when the emergency lights washed the cockpit in scarlet shapes and the warning siren’s blared. She looked down at her main display. Luna’s number two engine was overheating. If she didn’t do something soon it would likely explode, taking her with it.

  Panic devoured the logic-centers of her mind. Her eyes darted across the console, without seeing anything. Her breathing went fast and shallow.

  “Shutting down main engines,” Luna reported. The rumble of the engines faded to nothing and the Lunar Seed shed velocity like a cat her winter coat. For one solitary second, through the alarms blatting and the red emergency lights threatening to turn the whole world crimson, Ashla was weightless, suspended in space. Some distant and idiotic voice deep in her psyche shouted, “I made it to space!”

  Then the Lunar Seed and Ashla in it barreled back to the surface.

  A warbling tone sounded—some kind of emergency communications override—and Captain Eldagast’s voice poured over her, adding to the cacophony of chaos. Her eyes couldn’t focus. Her ears couldn’t make sense of his words.

  “I don’t know what to do!” Ashla shrieked. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Nhaaaazeeeeshhhooooon,” came the voice of Elder Hando. Ashla felt sleepy. Almost too sleepy to be scared. Her eyelids and arms grew heavy. Her shoulders slumped into a relaxed position.

  “I don’t...” she said as the last of her panic bled away.

  “Nhaazeeshoon,” Elder Hando repeated, a little quicker this time. Ashla got the skin-tingling feeling that he was sitting in the seat behind her.

  Now her eyes fluttered, closed, opened again, fluttered and then closed again. Her body felt distant, listless, weightless. The blaring warning alarms grew quiet and echoey, as if they were coming from a deep well.

  “Nhazeshon,” Elder Hando whispered, and Ashla entered a state of cogent sleep.

  “Now, Captain,” Hando said, his voice quiet. “Guide her to safety. Stay calm.”

  Captain Eldagast cleared his throat.

  “Ms. Vares? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Captain Eldagast,” Ashla said.

  “You do know what to do,” the Captain said, and the words were truer than the sun was bright.

  “Yes, Captain,” Ashla said, her voice slurred.

  “First, slow your descent.”

  Ashla opened her eyes. They were no longer heavy. She took the controls. Her arms were no longer leaden.

  “Open all wings and stabilizers,” Ashla said. Her fingers made it so. “Activate inertial engines.” Again, her fingers did it. Luna slowed to a gentle fall. “Done.”

  “Now, diagnose the problem with Engine number two,” the Captain said.

  “Diagnosing,” Ashla said. She tapped a few buttons on her main display and read the diagnosis aloud. “Engine number two has overheated. Recommend releasing thermal foam in the engine housing. The engine should be safe to use at no higher than 17% output.”

  “Do it.”

  Ashla activated the thermal foam cannister in engine number two. She watched as the temperature in
the engine housing dropped into the green. Then, with the Lunar Seed barely three kilometers above the surface, she reengaged the main engines, being sure to lock her output level to 15% and pulled up.

  Ashla heard a collective sigh of relief over the comm. She shook her head, feeling like she had just come out of a fog. A massive headache seemed to claw through her skull and into her brain.

  “Well done, Ms. Vares,” Captain Eldagast breathed. “Now, return to base. And watch your engine output.”

  “Yes sir,” Ashla said. She found herself struggling to remember the past few minutes as if it were last night’s dream. Her engine had overheated. She nosedived. The Captain helped her straighten out. But a piece was missing. Something someone said, was it Elder Hando?

  Ashla gritted her teeth against another pulse of pain in her head. This time it was accompanied by a wave of nausea.

  “Luna, take over. I need to close my eyes for a minute. If I happen to doze off...”

  “I will wake you before we land,” Luna said.

  “Thank’s Luna.”

  “You’re welcome, Ms. Ashla.”

  “Ms. Ashla,” Luna said, waking Ashla with a start. “We’re arriving soon.”

  Ashla blinked a few times, almost expecting another blasting pain in her head and another rolling storm of nausea. Instead she felt quite refreshed. Even at 15% engine output the ride home couldn’t have lasted more than an hour. Before passing out she was almost sure she was becoming ill. Now she felt fine.

  “Would you like to take control?” Luna asked.

  “Yes, Luna, transfer control to manual now.”

  Gripping the control stick and throttle again felt good, almost as if she hadn’t flown in a month. Far ahead, she saw the great wide limestone cliffs, broken here and there with landing bays. Below the cliffs stood a small town of ancillary buildings, homes, workshops, a hospital, etc. Above the cliffs stood the Meritine Palace, a tall, sprawling buildings with red brick walls and tall, arched windows. Behind that was the sky, beginning to turn red.